Page 24 of The Devils in the Details

I sucked on the caramel, sweet and salty, the flavor of a man making a series of questionable decisions and enjoying every minute of it.

He was still standing too close. Close enough that I could smell the cedar-and-coffee thing he had going on, close enough that the heat coming off him had nothing to do with the evening air and everything to do with the fact that Aristoteles Romano ran approximately ten degrees warmer than a human being had any right to, which was information my body had filed under “highly relevant” without consulting my better judgment.

“Are you finished?” he asked. The question carried the weight of a man who had many other questions lined up behind it and was selecting this one as a courtesy.

“With the caramel? Almost. With being difficult? Probably not.”

Something moved behind his eyes. Something complicated, warm, the kind of thing that lived in the neighborhood of exasperated affection without quite crossing the border.

I ate the rest of the caramel and waited for whatever came next, which, based on the look on his face, was going to be either extremely professional or not professional at all, and I was genuinely curious which one would win.

* * * *

After searching for Theo and coming up empty, Ari decided we were leaving with the same kind of motion he applied to everything—a single gesture, flat-palmed, cutting through the air like he was dismissing the entire concept of public squares—and then his hand was on my lower back, warm through the thin cotton of my T-shirt, and we were moving.

Not gripping. Not pushing. Just there, a point of contact that registered somewhere below my sternum with the specificity of a coordinates being entered into a GPS that was already recalculating several routes simultaneously, none of them professional.

Leon now had the Range Rover running at the edge of the piazza, engine idling with the patient rumble of something that cost more than my annual rent and had better suspension than my spine deserved.

The back door was open.

Ari’s hand guided me toward it with the kind of pressure that wasn’t quite steering and wasn’t quite not-steering, and then I was in, sliding across black leather that still held the day’s accumulated heat.

Ari followed, his larger frame folding itself into a space that had clearly been designed by someone who had never met a six-foot-three Italian with shoulders that could double as architectural supports.

The world outside went muffled as the door closed. Leon put the vehicle in gear without a word, and we pulled away from the Duomo with the acceleration of a man who considered traffic laws decorative rather than binding.

And then there was the thigh situation.

Four inches. That was the measurement, though I wasn’t using a tape measure because that would have been weird and also I didn’t have one, but four inches felt accurate based on the amount of my right thigh that was currently in direct, uncompromising contact with Ari’s left thigh.

The fact that my brain had registered this measurement at all was already several steps past the boundary of appropriate professional observation.

His thigh was warm. Solid. The kind of solid that came from years of actual physical labor rather than cosmetic gym time, and the difference was not subtle if you were pressed against it with the entirety of your right leg, which I was.

My pulse did something. A flush that started at my collarbones and worked its way upward with the leisurely confidence of something that knew it had clearance to proceed.

Fascinating. Clinically speaking. Nothing to do with me.

The silence between us had weight. Not the empty kind. The compressed kind—the silence of two people who were aware of exactly how many unspoken things were currently occupying the four inches of leather between their thighs, and had mutually decided, without discussion, to let those things remain unspoken for the moment.

It was a generous silence.

I appreciated its restraint.

Ari’s cedar-and-coffee scent filled the confined space of the back seat. No cologne. Just him, the warmth of his skin, something clean underneath it—soap, maybe, the kind that didn’t announce itself.

I breathed it in and did not catalogue how many times per minute I was doing so, because that would have been obsessive and I am many things, but I am not obsessive.

Three blocks into the drive, Ari spoke. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were on the windshield, on Florence sliding past the windows in amber and shadow, on anything that wasn’t the four inches of contact between us.

“How long did you know?” His voice was low. Rough. The kind that didn’t need volume to land in the close quarters of a car interior.

“Three blocks.” I shifted slightly. The thigh contact adjusted accordingly, which was physics and not a choice. “I wanted confirmation before I texted. Professional standards.”

“You stopped for gelato.”

“I stopped for confirmation. The gelato was a secondary objective. They are not mutually exclusive concepts, and for the record, the pistachio was excellent. If you’d like a review, I could—”